It has long been known that we are torturing, holding detainees in secret prisons beyond the reach of law and civilization, sending detainees to the worst human rights abusers to be tortured, and subjecting them ourselves to all sorts of treatment which both our own laws and the treaties to which we are a party plainly prohibit. None of this is new.

And we have decided, collectively as a country, to do nothing about that.

4 Responses to “Greenwald on the Latest Torture Revelations”

With article after article coming out describing how the USA tortures and kills to extract ‘actionable intelligence’ it is no wonder the rest of the world views the shrubco junta as nothing more than your garden variety thugs.

And today’s news has the right-leaning supreme court rejecting to even hear the case of Khaled el-Masri. Who you might ask? The German citizen who was kidnapped, tortured and then – oops! – released, after we finally figured out we nabbed the wrong guy. Or that Canadian Maher Arar… there are thousands we never hear about (some of them now dead, oops!)

Also in today’s news former President Carter blasts the bushista junta for bringing America lower than the scum we are ‘fighting.’

IANAL, but since el-Masri isn’t an American citizen, so it’s not all that surprising that the Court would decline this, is it? Of course the lower court invoked the state secrets thing, which is unfortunate, but overall this just seems outside the purview of the US Federal Court system to me. You can’t blame this on a “conservative court” — there was no dissent.

I abhor extraordinary rendition as much as anybody here, but that means we must pass laws against engaging that kind of behavior outside our borders. It’s a legislative issue, and our legislature is failing to do its job.

One American woman’s personal response to witnessing the hell of torture was extreme. At least she won’t have nightmares for the rest of her life.

What makes this story even more interesting is the manner in which the truth came out – the moral of the story is not to beleive anything the military reports unless there is convincing corraborating evidence.

One of the first women to die in Iraq shot and killed herself after objecting to harsh “interrogation techniques.”
The true stories of how American troops, killed in Iraq, actually died keep spilling out this week. On Tuesday, we explored the case of Kenny Stanton, Jr., murdered last month by our allies, the Iraqi police, though the military didn’t make that known at the time. Now we learn that one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq died by her own hand after objecting to interrogation techniques used on prisoners.

She was Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Az., native serving with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. Peterson was an Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal-Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on Sept. 15, 2003, from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”

She was only the third American woman killed in Iraq so her death drew wide press attention. A “non-hostile weapons discharge” leading to death is not unusual in Iraq, often quite accidental, so this one apparently raised few eyebrows. The Arizona Republic, three days after her death, reported that Army officials “said that a number of possible scenarios are being considered, including Peterson’s own weapon discharging, the weapon of another soldier discharging or the accidental shooting of Peterson by an Iraqi civilian.”

But in this case, a longtime radio and newspaper reporter named Kevin Elston, unsatisfied with the public story, decided to probe deeper in 2005, “just on a hunch,” he told E&P today. He made “hundreds of phone calls” to the military and couldn’t get anywhere, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act request. When the documents of the official investigation of her death arrived, they contained bombshell revelations. Here’s what the Flagstaff public radio station, KNAU, where Elston now works, reported yesterday:

“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed….”